Artist Brett Murray brings a piece of Cape Town’s `generous cultural spirit’ to Johannesburg this weekend. He spoke to HAZEL FRIEDMAN
THE boy with the golliwog hair and dangling earrings smiles impishly at the lens, his teeth and the whites of his eyes made more luminescent by the contrast with blackened, cherubic cheeks. This is a photograph of Cape Town-based artist Brett Murray, age six, in the guise of a Zulu warrior.
Nothing untoward about that. Every white South African kid has had the chance to dress up as Dingaan or sing Shoshaloza at some stage of his or her sheltered evolution. But there is an unmistakable weirdness about the image. Decades after it was taken, Murray has used it as the invitation to his second solo exhibition, White Boy Sings the Blues.
Did he know — at the age of six — that Winky Doll would ultimately meet the Oros Man?
His first show in 1989 — at the Market Gallery, as it was then called — comprised rotund, wide- eyed little monsters: a mixture of evil and innocence derived from children’s comics and Murray’s own mirror. The murderous butcher with sharpened cleavers bloodied from self-mutilation; top-hatted Voortrekkers in tails playing leapfrog; goose-stepping policemen in oversized boots; a masturbating monkey called The Great Trek — this was art for a state of emergency: satirical, subversive, outrageous and outraged, hitting apartheid’s “funny bone” (where it hurt most) and pummelling its collective unconscious.
In the early 1990s, his anal and derivative objects of the 1980s (Murray admits to being heavily influenced by artist and Michaelis lecturer Bruce Arnot at the time) shifted to a new form of eclecticism. Borrowed imagery was recontextualised as metal silhouettes which served equally as icons and consumables of Africa. Angry humour was replaced by detached irony. Murray became the Oros Man, the quasi-Ndebele, the post-modernist parodying Afrikaner nationalist sensibilities while simultaneously revelling in them. His work was unashamedly nostalgic, seducing viewers with its visual charms while gently pulling the rug from under them.
He’s still a hot contender for the Kellogg’s Snap, Crackle and Pop Art award. Yet he doesn’t quite fit in the contemporary conceptual playground. For one thing, he operates from Cape Town, which frees him from the “I art therefore I am” jugular mindset of Johannesburg. “There’s a viciousness about the art scene of this city that I don’t want to be part of,” he says. “Cape Town has a more generous cultural spirit.”
For another — a possible hangover from a glut of Little Dot and Richie Rich comics — he prefers pictures to words and action to theory. Having done Chile and heading for Frankfurt, he’s familiar with the internationalist jive, but still comfortable with his South Africanness. To him, the best art is not about art (“That’s like a puppy chasing its own tail”) but about life.
“I don’t believe it’s parochial to keep trying to locate oneself in a specific time and place. There’s a particular rawness, grittiness, grime and passion that is uniquely South African,” he says. “It’s sad that so many South African artists try to emulate the clinical refinement of their overseas counterparts.”
Maybe that’s why Murray has made the transition from 1980s agitprop artist to post-apartheid individualist with such ease. There’s a connectedness in his work — if not in form, then in obsessive focus — which makes it all seem part of a larger conceptual plan.
“If I had to change my earlier Eighties work,” he says, “it would be only in terms of the language I used. But it’s been incredibly liberating for me moving from one era to the next, shifting from a didactic position to a more meditative, metaphoric one.” He adds: “I’ve also realised that old perceptions continue even though the political faces might change.”
Which is probably why, in White Boy Sings the Blues, Murray’s iconography revolves around heads and profiles — his own; those of infamous apartheid ghosts like Hendrik Verwoerd; as well as “authentic” busts purchased by tourists as curiosities. Made of his customary perspex and encased in metal, from a distance they resemble maps, laagers or distorted wagon wheels.
They are tragi-comic, but the flippancy of the earlier works has been replaced by a kind of darkness. His graphic imagery has also become more abstracted — stripped to bare essentials. In Language and Land, for example, five generic silhouettes derived from colonial images are adorned with nothing but flames. These possibly signify consciousness, destruction and/or resurrection. And there are bottles filled with, among other materials, sand representing land — and water for tears. There are no good or bad guys; no overt references either to retribution or reconciliation.
Suddenly the winky-impi invitation becomes a paradigm for the entire exhibition. Not only does it refer to white perceptions of black Africa, but also to the contradictions besetting the South African artist as “klip gooier” (stone thrower): the eloquence of this rebellious gesture — and the absurdity.
White Boy Sings the Blues opens at the Rembrandt Gallery, Newtown, on Sunday at 6pm